It was Ron’s third tour that brought him back. The first two had been imposed, mandatory under the necessities of war and the shortage in man power. This latest was pure escapism. Ron and Alicia had begun to discuss their wedding when Ron broke the news that he had decided to return to his squad and his men, still halfway across the world.
“But our wedding…” she said, knowing that he was already somewhere else, his mind unable to fix itself around the idea.
Ron looked out onto the quiet suburban street that sat outside the window of their split-level. The leaves were beginning to change color and he realized that it was probably time to rake up the ones that had fallen and now dotted the lawn in decaying mounds of yellows and reds and browns.
“Promise me,” Alicia began, “just this last time. No more after this.”
---
Ron arrived back at base, where everything was familiar. With the distant sound of gunfire and mortars, he was once more able to sleep. With every choking morning when the temperatures rose to the 90s and 100s shortly after sunrise, he was once more able to breath.
But this time around, there was also Doug – free-wheeling, undisciplined, loud-mouthed, new to the desert, and assigned to Ron’s squad. Ron, with his brooding, disciplined countenance, and a wide, muscular, pitbullish stature, instantly found himself disliking the gaunt man and his harsh, chiseled face, his striking blue eyes.
“Hey Doc,” he’d say to Ron as he’d pull up next to him in the dining hall. The name came from one occasion when Ron correctly suggested talcum powder for a mild rash on Doug’s inner thigh and managed to quell Doug’s fear that it might be a spreading venereal disease.
Technically, Ron wasn’t a superior, so he couldn’t reprimand Doug for not saluting or being more formal with him. “Call me Ron,” is all he said, and then forcefully dug his fork into his mashed potatoes for emphasis, making the mess hall table shake.
“Doc, what do you think of this brisket today? Pretty shitty right?”
For his part, Doug refused to notice or was completely oblivious to Ron’s antipathy towards him, and would proceed to launch into long narratives about his life. After a few months, Ron knew everything there was to know about Doug’s childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland where he was the only kid from an Italian-Australian-Native American background in town, his failed first marriage to a high school sweetheart who ended up leaving him for a horror movie director who seduced her into doing softcore porn vampire movies, even the way he almost got drafted into the majors to play baseball but then screwed up his arm during a drunken arm wrestling match against an Elvis impersonator.
“The dude looked kind of chubby and weak, like the older Elvis, so I thought it was a done deal. Boy was I wrong!”
Most of Doug’s time in the Army had been spent doing desk work and making an extra buck on the side by running small-time gambling rings in bases across Europe and Asia. And apparently there were major generals who still owed Doug money for lost bets, but inevitably it was hard to collect from these people.
“If you only knew the size of the goldmine I’m sitting on…I could buy myself a nice chunk of this place and turn it into another Dubai, but one where you could drink and wear shorts and do all sorts of things without anyone breathing down your neck about it.”
Doug seemed to be someone who was in the Army out of boredom, perhaps because he had screwed up his life back at home and couldn’t figure out what else to do with himself. This, more than anything else, was why Ron couldn’t stand Doug – in Doug’s eyes, Ron’s beloved Army was a joke.
“He’s a fucking POG,” ranted Nate, another soldier in the squad, using the derogatory term for non-infantry personnel. “Don’t pay him any mind. I’m just thinking that he better not get us all shot up. Don’t those boys at central know who they’re throwing down here with us?”
Nate was referencing “the fear,” both as a generic idea and as it applied to the way the crass and obnoxious and cocksure Doug would turn into a 6’2” pillar of salt whenever they would go on their standard forays into neighboring towns to survey the scene and to gather information. Doug would hold his breath on the ride over and then hover near Ron as they spoke with villagers, all the while keeping a death grip on his rifle. The slightest odd noise would startle Doug into stiff attention and his eyes would begin to dart around in their sockets, trying to see through walls and deep into narrow alleyways and past the smiles and nods of the villagers who would politely assist the Americans one day and aid the enemy the next.
“Your friend, he is OK?” asked one bearded man who received regular visits from Ron’s squad. His beard was an unusual shade of orange and rolled down towards his chest like the wave of a sputtering flame.
“He’s fine. He’s just not used to all of the sand.”
The man laughed. “Then maybe he is in the wrong job.”
Ron understood that Doug’s condition was a danger to the squad and felt it his responsibility to speak with his commanders about getting Doug transferred out, back to a desk job or some other forgettable role in a distant corner of the Army bureaucracy. But the best he could manage were assurances that the commanders would look into, and as far as he could tell, Doug didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
---
“There are so many stars!” Doug said one evening as the two men found themselves on a night watch shift.
“They’ve always been there. You’ve never noticed them before?” asked Ron.
“I have. I just react that way every time I see them. Makes you think about how insignificant we all are, huh?”
In the darkness, Ron rolled his eyes at the cliché.
“Are you afraid of anything?” Doug asked after a few moments of silence, of them staring off into the dull shine of battles in the distance, the soft lights that in any other place in the world could have been the collective glow of TVs turned on to the local 9 o’clock news.
“What do you mean?”
“Doc, you gotta be afraid of something. Like dying.”
“I’m not afraid of dying.”
“So then what? Zombies? Enclosed spaces? Heights?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
Ron thought about it for a moment. “Maybe feeling empty. Feeling like you’re dead.”
“Feeling like you’re dead? Like what happens after you die? Like you’re afraid that it’s all just one big black hole of nothingness?”
“No, it has nothing to do with death,” answered Ron. “I guess I’m afraid of being alive and feeling nothing. Just cold, blank.”
“So…you are afraid of zombies?”
Ron sighed and Doug nodded as if he understood.
“Well I’m just afraid of dying.” Doug added. “Mine is simple.”
The men stopped talking and listened, so that soon all they heard was the hollow sound of the sand being kicked up by the wind and ricocheting against the steel and canvas and stone of their little base among the dunes.
---
It was a few days later that the squad came under attack. They were once again visiting the bearded man when they began to take gunfire from neighboring rooftops.
“Cover, cover!” yelled Nate, as he led them behind a burned out wall that still held the skeleton door frame and windows of the house it had once been.
Doug instantly fell onto one knee and cowered.
“Up! Now!” commanded Ron as he pulled at Doug and got him to his feet.
They ran behind the rest of the squad and just as they were about to get to the wall, Ron felt a flood of pain rip through his leg. He dropped to the ground and his dead weight dragged Doug down as well.
There was a moment of confusion where Doug didn’t know whether he had been shot himself. But then he saw the growing pool of blood alongside him.
“Fuck!” Doug began to scream like a siren, spacing his expletives in timed intervals.
He grabbed Ron by his pack and began pulling him towards the wall as bullets smacked into the rocks around them and tossed up little clouds of dirt and debris into the air. A couple of the other men in the squad stepped out and began to shoot at the snipers poised on the roof, giving Doug extra cover as he pulled Ron behind the wall.
“Call it in!” he heard someone shout.
There were bursts of machine gun fire that continued for a few more moments, but then the thunder of jet planes drowned everything out. They came like a crash of horses from the east and whistled as they passed overhead. In their wake there was quiet, followed by an earthquake rumble tearing through the ground and then a delayed ripple of explosions that temporarily severed consciousness from body before violently hurtling it back.
Ron lay on his back and stared up at the open sky above him. He felt a tug at his leg but he didn’t have the energy to look down to see what was being done. Somewhere that seemed far away he thought he could hear Alicia voice. She was saying something to him, something mundane about doing the dishes or taking out the trash. But her voice quickly became severed, overcome by the sound of a man crying something in Arabic. The anguish of the man’s shouts filled his ears as he drifted into the empty space, the blackness of it all.
---
“The good news is you’re not dead!” said Doug as he stood over Ron’s bed. “And you get to go home,” he added morbidly.
Ron shrugged. “This was going to be my last tour anyway.”
“Turns out they clipped you pretty high up on your leg. More ass than leg really, if you ask me. Although I won’t tell anyone.” Doug winked at him furtively.
After a few weeks in the hospital, Ron was back on his feet, with little to show for his injuries other than a small limp and a standard issue Army cane.
“They want to give me a medal, can you believe it?” asked Doug.
Ron couldn’t believe it. In a few mindless seconds, Doug had gone from being the guy who would likely get everyone killed to being a body-dragging hero. Ron glanced at Doug and was struck by the reality of what had happened.
“I never thanked you for what you did.”
Doug waved away his comment. “I know I’m mostly a coward, so whatever I did out there, I don’t really know where it came from.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe it was just a moment of divine inspiration.” Doug smiled at him. “Who knows?”
“Whatever it was-” Ron said and then let his words drift off.
Ron knew what it was like to take a life, to fire his gun and watch something heavy drop in the distance. There was an intellectual sense of success that came with it, the thought that he had done his job and was helping his side complete its mission. But there was nothing beyond that. No feeling of joy or sadness, no regret, nothing that was definable as either good or bad, light or heavy. There was the plain reality of the act, the mathematical, statistical significance of body counts and the basic human striving towards being successful at what you do. Beyond that, all was blank, flat-line.
But what was it like to save someone? If death was the ultimate subtractor, then here was Doug, the opposing equalizer, who now seemed to radiate with some new-found power. Ron longed to feel what it meant to be on Doug’s side of the equation. Maybe that’s what had been missing, the thing he had been searching for all this time in the face of the hollowness inside of him. And now it seemed that he would never find out.
“What’s up with this cane? You need to get something a little more stylish and bad-ass. This is the kind of shit they give grandmas.” Doug patted him on the shoulder for reassurance. “Don’t worry buddy, we’ll find you something a little more suitable.”
Doug seemed to linger in the hospital a lot for someone that still had his regular duties to attend to, and each time he arrived with a new piece of get-well mail that had come from back home. Most everything was from Alicia who insisted on sending him cards and stuffed animals even though they IMed each other and video chatted when they could. But Ron often found himself getting frustrated with the attention, preferring to be left alone to think about the fact that he was never going to get a chance to come back to the squad.
“Check this out,” Doug said one day, and presented Ron with a wooden cane topped by a miniature skull. “It’s in the shape of a falcon head,” he noted. “And the cane itself is a piece of palm driftwood.” He waited for Ron to react to this information. “Do you know how hard it is to find driftwood in this country? It’s like gold.”
“Thanks,” said Ron, and placed the cane alongside his pack which was already filled for the return trip.
“Go ahead, test it out!”
Ron grudgingly pulled himself from the bed and hobble around the room. His normal gait had mostly returned to him, but he still made a show of using the cane.
“Awesome, totally awesome.” Doug nodded at Ron as if the cane had been his own handiwork.
“I’m sure,” said Ron.
Doug laughed and slapped his leg. “I’m gonna miss you Doc, with all of your seriousness. You’ve been my one only real friend here.”
Ron shrugged, not knowing how else to respond to the sentiment.
“But this is good for you! You’re going home, you’re getting married soon. That’s great. Real great. And your leg should be good as new soon enough. A lot to look forward to. I’m telling you Doc, you have it made.”
Ron nodded and ran his hand along the contours of the cane’s skull-shaped handle.
“I wish I knew what I was going to do when I got out. I wish I had it all figured out like you do.”
“Why don’t you come stay with Alicia and me when your tour is done?” Ron said, surprising himself with the suggestion. “Until you figure out what your next move is.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s the least I can do.”
---
When Ron’s plane landed he disembarked in his neatly pressed uniform and found Alicia standing with his parents, his sister, and a big cluster of multi-colored balloons. They all took turns hugging him. He nodded along and smiled.
“What is that horrible thing?” Alicia asked, pointing to his cane.
“My wooden leg,” Ron joked.
“It’s so ugly.”
“It was a gift from the man who saved me,” he said pointedly.
Back at home Ron began to slowly reacclimatize to the world he had left behind only a few months earlier. During the day, when Alicia went off to work, he took his cane and strolled the suburban streets of their town, abandoned at midday. Sometime he walked in one direction for miles, precariously limping his way across the narrow highway and over to the state park by the river. He sat by the river bank and let the breeze flush over him before turning around and heading home in time to catch Alicia pulling into the driveway.
Alicia tried to coax Ron into conversation but mostly Ron preferred to sit in silence, with just the clanking of silverware or the dull hum of the TV filling the space between them. At night he lay awake and listened as she would begin to snore lightly, and then, after a moment, gulp at the air as if she were drowning, before finally catching her breath, inhaling deeply, and falling silent, only to repeat the entire sequence a few minutes later. Sometimes she would twitch as she fell asleep or when she was in the middle of a dream. He wondered what sorts of things she dreamed about.
On occasion he would crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and walk onto their front patio to stare up at the stars above their house. Nothing seemed as clear here, the haze of surrounding light pollution and smog combined to cloud the view and none of the stars were luminous in the way he had seen them before. Still, he strained his eyes and looked, searched, for the things that had been familiar.
“Why are you telling this to me now?” Alicia asked in hushed anger. “Why didn’t you consult me?”
Ron considered her but didn’t say anything. He turned his attention back to the white cloth in his hand. Then he dipped the cloth in a container of polish and proceeded to rub at the black boots propped on the kitchen table.
“You can’t just go and invite some stranger to stay with us without asking me.”
“He’s not a stranger.”
“Where’s he even going to sleep? On the couch?”
“Yes, on the couch,” answered Ron, and then stopped to consider the effect made by the polish. “Perfect,” he said quietly.
“Can you stop doing that and look at me for two minutes?”
Ron released the boots and turned to look at Alicia.
“So?” she asked.
“So what?” Ron sighed. Alicia didn’t understand. “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand what?”
It was pointless trying to explain.
Alicia bit her lip, she didn’t know if this was a battle worth fighting. She tried to tread carefully around Ron during the weeks since his return, giving him the space to get comfortable with their life together again, being patient while he lazed around the house and sometimes stared off blankly at nothing in particular, waiting on him to decide that it was finally time to start looking for a job again. She had even gone out of her way to call up a few of Ron’s old friends and arrange for some part-time work for the time being, until he was ready for a more permanent position. But when she offered him the neat list which noted all of the opportunities she had found, Ron just thanked her and never bothered to call anybody back.
“For how long?” she asked.
“How long what?” asked Ron distractedly.
“How long will he need to stay with us?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
---
Alicia took a dislike to Doug as soon as she met him, in much the same way that Ron had. Doug tried to be charming by kissing Alicia’s hand when she extended it to him, but it just ended up disgusting her. That first evening g while they sat around having dinner, Doug excused himself before dessert because of a “chick” he had met on the bus into town who he was going to “make it with” that night.
“Don’t wait up mom and dad,” he added as he left the house.
That night Alicia lay awake alongside Ron as they listened to Doug return. He bumped into tables and knocked keys and change onto the floor. Then there was the sound of commotion, and the house began to throb with a steady, sustained rhythm of movement.
“Are you hearing this?” she asked Ron in the darkness. “Is this seriously happening?”
Somewhere below them, fabric was being rubbed vigorously, the couch squeaked, someone scratched at the walls, and then moaned.
Doug kept saying that he didn’t want to impose, but soon after arriving, he turned the house into a staging ground for his get-rich-quick schemes. First there were piles of old Playboy magazines that he tried selling as collectors’ items on eBay. Then he rented a bunch of computers and tried to simultaneously play ten games of online poker, but that only ended up blowing the fuses. One day Alicia returned home from work to find that Doug had sectioned off pieces of the first and second floors, as well as the garage, as temporary office spaces that he was renting out to local entrepreneurs.
“Get them out of here!” she fumed.
Later, she found Ron sitting out on the grass in the backyard, the skull cane laying next to him.
Ron squinted at her. He twisted onto his side and rose to his feet, picking up the cane and leaning onto it.
Alicia grabbed at it.
“You don’t need a cane. You only have a mild limp. I don’t know why you keep insisting on walking around with this thing. Stop acting like you’re a cripple.”
Ron wavered on his feet, he looked vulnerable without the cane.
“Things need to change Ron. I’ve been patient but I can’t keep doing this. I need him out of the house now. I need you to start being a normal human being.” She said it calmly and directly, without anger or frustration. It was just a matter of fact, an order.
Ron’s silence in the face of Alicia’s request seemed to represent his assent, but instead he found himself frustrated and angry. How could Alicia ask him to throw Doug onto the street? How could she expect him to treat a hero, the man who had saved his life, so dismissively? Doug had become a brother, he was family now, whether Alicia liked it or not. But she just didn’t understand any of that, didn’t know what it meant to be on the base with the men and go into combat with them and face the prospect of killing and dying on a daily basis. Everything was simple here, without risk. Life consisted of eating and working and mindless, polite conversation, until it was time to close your eyes and go to sleep. There was no purpose to any of it, the monotony had no beginning or end. It continued for the sake of itself, feeding and perpetuating its own existence without any meaning or intention underlying any of it. Nothing made sense here, it seemed illogical and pointless in a way that war with its winning and losing, living or dying, didn’t.
As Ron stewed in contemplation for a few days, trying to figure out what he would do with Doug, Doug surprised them with an announcement.
“The winds carry me west,” he said during dinner later that week as he cut through his steak and his knife squeaked against the ceramic dinner plate.
“What does that mean?” asked Alicia.
“It means I am leaving you two wonderful, hospitable people. Tomorrow. I have a train to catch.” Doug paused, for effect. “To destiny.”
“Oh really?” asked Alicia, perking up, her eyes brightening.
“We’ll be sorry to see you go,” added Ron.
“I gotta do this Doc. Big business opportunity waiting for me. Keep your fingers crossed.”
“They’ve been crossed for a while,” Alicia murmured under her breath.
“Can someone give me a ride to the station in the afternoon?” asked Doug as he picked at a kernel of pepper stuck in his teeth.
---
With Doug out of the house, and on Alicia’s more firm insistence, Ron dug up the list of part-time jobs that she had put together for him and called up some of his old friends. He began imposing new routines to make himself, once more, an active, involved member of society.
“You’ll see,” she said. “It might seem strange now but you just need to start working and doing regular things and then you’ll get used to it all again.”
Get used to what? A life he resented? And to what end? For what purpose? But he went along grudgingly, if only to please Alicia and make her stop constantly hovering over him.
“And can you please throw that awful cane out?” she added, thinking that she was beginning to swing the tide of the battle.
Ron promised to take it out to the trash but secretly shoved it to the back of the broom closet where he knew she would never find it unless she went looking.
On weekends Ron and Alicia would sometime go to the movies, or head through town to get pizza and ice cream, or even walk along the pier and watch the moored boats rock together with the waves.
“You can see the stars better here than you can from outside the house,” Ron noted.
“I’m cold,” said Alicia, ignoring him.
“There’s Orion.” He paused. “And there’s Venus. It’s bright tonight.”
“Can you put your arm around me?” she asked, because it seemed to her that she had to ask for everything with him, remind him of everything, of what you were supposed to do when you were sitting next to someone and they told you they were cold.
Ron draped his arm around Alicia and let his hand drop limply against her shoulder. Alicia closed her eyes and leaned into him, breathing in his smell.
---
Soon, Ron and Alicia began planning their wedding again, and after some back and forth disagreement on the subject, Doug was added to the guest list.
Against Alicia’s hopes that he had vanished from the face of the earth and despite Doug’s failure to send back an RSVP card, Doug showed up to the wedding a few months later. It was the first time they had seen him since he had moved out. But there he was, tan, dressed in a sharp pin-stripe suit, with a tall woman in 4-inch heels and a short sequined dress giggling into his neck. His blue eyes stood in handsome contrast to his browned skin.
“To Doug,” said Ron when he toasted the guests and thanked them for coming, “the man who saved my life.”
Doug raised his scotch and proceeded to drain the glass.
Later Doug came over to where Ron and Alicia were seated and toasted them in return, “You guys are great,” he said, slurring his words, “Alicia, you’re great.”
“Thank you,” she said, leaning away from him as he stuck his face forward.
“And Doc, you’re great too.”
Ron nodded.
“Salut!” he shouted and took a sip of his refilled scotch. “You took me in when I had nowhere else to go, and you put up with all of my entrepreneurial ventures.” He looked at them and paused for effect. “And that means a lot to me. I just want you to know that.”
Alicia forced a tight-lipped smile. “Yes, ‘entrepreneurial’.” She looked at her nails.
“I hope you guys have a great life. You deserve it! I hope you go on to have oodles of babies. Little Alicias and little Docs.” He giggled to himself and poked Ron with his finger.
“Thank you,” Alicia said with finality and waited for him to leave.
“Doc, can I ask you something?” Doug began again, turning to Ron.
“Sure Doug, what is it?”
“Outside. Private. Just one minute.” He stuck up his index finger to hammer home his point. He showed the finger to Alicia. “One minute. I promise.”
Ron stood and led Doug out into the hallway.
“She’s great too, that one over there,” said Doug, indicating his date. She was seated at the table and checking her makeup in a little vanity mirror. “Margie.”
“She seems nice.”
“She’s my business partner’s sister. Totally unexpected! I thought I was just going to Oregon to make some money but then I meet her too. Two for one!” Doug took another moment to absorb the site of Margie – who now scratched her leg and pulled at a stocking – to let her presence sink in. Then he turned to look at Ron and placed his hand on Ron’s shoulder.
“Wow Doc, it’s been a while.”
“Yes,” Ron said wistfully.
“Seems like only yesterday we were fighting the bad guys, protecting liberty and freedom. ‘The American Way!’ And now here we are, like none of it ever happened.” Doug bit his lip. “Just feels like something is missing.”
Ron nodded slowly. He had spent the last few months trying to ignore it all, bury the pulse of reality that kept beating underneath the things he made himself do and say so that he could lead a “normal” life. But with one sentence, Doug reminded him of everything he had been feeling.
Doug took another sip of his scotch. “We were brothers out there. You know? We had each others’ backs.”
“It’s not the same here.”
“No,” Doug said stiffly. “It’s not.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts. He sighed. He shifted uncomfortably on his feet and then decided to drop his weight onto a leather bench. “Which is why this business thing has been such a wake-up call…It feels like the first real thing I’ve ever done – you know what I mean – and I really want it to work out. I believe in it.”
“How is all of that going?”
“Wonderful! Just wonderful! Lot of potential.”
“What is it exactly?”
“It’s complicated. Really technical stuff. My partner is an engineer.”
“What sort of engineer?”
“Mechanical or something. Biomechanical. No, wait…Medical! Biomedical? Biomedical!”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Thanks, yeah. It is interesting. It’s just that this is a sensitive time right now. Hit or miss. We’re right on the cusp of making it big but we’re a little short on resources. And wherever I’ve looked for help, from people I consider friends, from my own family, I’ve gotten nothing. Would you believe it? They have no vision. They don’t understand.” Doug leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“It’s hard for them to understand. They weren’t there.”
“No one gets it, you know? But I think we get it. Right? We get it, you and I. You get it, right?” Doug licked his lips. He swirled his drink which was all just melting ice now, and swung a cube into his mouth. “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
“What?”
“Do you think you might be interested in investing?”
“I don’t know Doug. This is a tough time for us. With the wedding and everything. We don’t have a lot saved up.”
“We just need this one final push and it’s a sure thing.”
Ron hesitated. “I don’t think I can.”
“OK.” Doug dropped his voice and looked at the floor. “OK that’s fine.”
Without another word, Doug slowly lifted himself up from the bench and started moving back towards the reception hall. His whole demeanor changed and Ron watched the way the man’s strength had been completely drained from him. He looked as if he might collapse. Ron thought about what Doug told him back in the hospital – “I’m a coward,” he had said, or something along those lines. And yet this coward had done more for him than anyone else ever had.
“Maybe,” Ron called out. “Maybe we can manage something to help out.”
---
“He’s a loser Ron,” said Alicia as she leaned against the kitchen counter and chewed on her fingernails. “Forget the money that we’ll never see again because of your investment in his ‘business’ – I don’t even care about that anymore. It’s not like we need money because, you know, we’re independently wealthy, aren’t we? We don’t need to fix this old kitchen, or the leak in the bathroom. We don’t need to start saving. You and I both knew the money was gone as soon as you gave it to him.” Alicia’s eyes looked wound and wild. She exhaled loudly and tried to calm herself. “I’m done with that, I’m over it. But he can’t keep living with us! That’s just too much! I thought we went through this the last time. You’re not responsible for him Ron. He’s a grown man and made his own decisions. He ran his business into the ground despite the fact that you helped him. He’s responsible for himself.”
“What am I supposed to do?” asked Ron, getting exasperated. He was struck, perhaps for the first time in his life, by a sense of fear, by the approach of something inevitable.
“Get him out of here! I don’t care how you do it! I just want him gone.”
Ron heard Doug’s heavy snoring in the living room.
“For real this time,” asserted Alicia. “No more losing your nerve.”
“At least let him sleep for now. I’ll tell him in the morning,” he said dejectedly.
“I know he saved your life, but we can’t go on being his adoptive parents just because he doesn’t know how to run his own life.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry,” she said more tenderly, and came over to embrace him. She kissed him on the cheek and moved away to head back upstairs. “Coming?”
“In a minute,” he told her. “You go ahead.”
When Alicia had gone, Ron walked over to the broom closet and reached for the object that lay hidden in the dark corner.
When the cane with the skull handle was in his hand, Ron tested it out, placing the tip of the driftwood on the ground and leaning his weight against it. He moved toward the living room slowly and thoughtfully, trying to remember what it had been like back in the hospital when he was still limping from his injury and made a show of needing the cane to support his movement.
Ron approached Doug and looked down at the man on the couch, lost in a deep sleep. He wondered about where he would go and what he would do, how he would manage. Did he have enough money to take care of himself? Did he have other people who would take him in? Ron suddenly realized he had never asked Doug any of these questions, had never really gotten to know him as a friend, and didn’t actually know all that much about him.
Doug shifted on the couch and his breathing changed as he choked on his snore.
“What’s up Doc?” he said groggily, wavering on the precipice of consciousness. Doug smiled to himself at the thought of something. “Like Bugs Bunny.” He yawned.
Ron felt the weight of the cane in his hand. “Go back to sleep.”
“OK Doc, whatever you say.” Doug turned to face the cushions of the couch. “Yes sir,” he mumbled as he drifted off.
The morning would bring a new reality, Ron understood that now. It was a reality that he had resisted but which was now rushing at him with an impending sense of conclusion. Ron was alive, and yet he pitied the man who had saved him.
As Ron walked away and began to climb up to the second floor, he tapped the cane against each step and listened as the hollow sound became a familiar rhythm. It was a sound both ancient and foreign, something from the dessert, like the dull drumming of callused hands against darbukas in the villages where he had patrolled. He remembered the men sitting with the drums between their legs, letting their fingers and palms fall against the vellum as others swung their arms loosely and danced with their heads bowed, the dust and smoke in the air making their eyes seem glassy in the light.
There was so much that he missed, so much that was lost to him forever.
